This collection of work builds on the themes of “Home of the Paleoethnobotanist”.  Interiors are still the backbone but rather than highlighting underknown women artists and collecting in general, the work in this show took poems as a starting point. Poetry, like art, takes you somewhere else.  And I was intrigued by ekphrastic poetry and that there wasn't a ready term for a painted equivalent.

I have always painted subjects beyond interiors but for this show I’ve looked more to myself and my own life.  Underlying it all is an interest in ‘interiority’ whether it’s a desk strewn with papers, looking at someone reading a book or trying to decode what the contents of a room reveal about its inhabitant(s). But the paintings still contain an interest in the symbolism of flowers and other objects which the viewer can choose to engage with if they wish.

For many years I worked at The London Library, and as in so many things, while I worked there I was confronted by my ignorance, surrounded by such clever and interesting people.  I’d never even heard of a Commonplace Book back then (it’s a scrapbook of sorts in which people from antiquity to around the 19th century kept notes of things that interested them).  They don’t have prescribed subjects that they cover.  And when I was trying to explain what this collection of paintings was about they resisted a straight-forward description and so I felt that the reference to the 'commonplace' idea gave room to house the different subjects.  And that they are okay to be together for the pure and simple reason all the subjects are of interest to me.

I am a daughter, mother & older sister so I know what that feels like in my own limited way, but my daughter has three half-siblings, two brothers and a sister, and it’s been fascinating to see how that works.  Painting a subject is a way of exploring and understanding it and so it’s been interesting to spend time considering that aspect of life.  I also looked at old formal studio photos of children - they are so stiff but almost always you spot the tiniest gesture of affection - a little finger touching the end of another finger - and I found them moving. One of my favourite pictures is Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.  The pose is so truthful and the opposite of sentimental and I wanted to see if it’s possible to paint children, convey a sense of their complexities, but not in a mawkish way.

I like imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else, to be someone else, to have different tastes and interests.  And every painting is a chance to be something different.